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Abstract

Visual action recognition is a prerequisite for humans to physically interact with other humans. Do we use similar perceptual mechanisms when recognizing actions from a photo (static) or a movie (dynamic)? We used an adaptation paradigm to explore whether static and dynamic action information is processed in separate or interdependent action-sensitive channels. In an adaptation paradigm participants' perception of an ambiguous test stimulus is biased after the prolonged exposure to an adapting stimulus (adaptation aftereffect (AA)). This is often taken as evidence for the existence of interdependent perceptual channels. We used a novel action morphing technique to produce ambiguous test actions that were a weighted linear combination of the two adaptor actions. We varied the dynamics of the content (i.e. static vs. dynamic) of the test and adaptor stimuli independently and were interested in whether the AA was modulated by the congruency of motion information between test and adaptor. The results indicated that the AA only occurred when the dynamics of the content between the test and adaptor were congruent (p<0.05) but not when they were incongruent (p>0.05). These results provide evidence that static and dynamic action information are processed to some degree separately.